Modern businesses and industries relay heavily on digital documents as a primary means of communication and documentation. The proliferation of desktop and office printers has led to an incredible increase in the quantity of printed documents. In many cases, the printed documents contain proprietary and/or confidential material. These documents can easily be brought outside the company site in an unauthorized manner, either by overly devoted employees who wishes to keep-on working on the documents outside the company site, or maliciously, by employees who deliberately give away confidential and/or proprietary material to unauthorized third party. Companies are at daily risk of disclosing sensitive internal documents, leading to substantial financial losses. Banking, legal, medical, government, and manufacturing companies have much to lose if sensitive internal documents are leaked. The safe distribution of internal documents, memos, blueprints, payroll records, patient medical information, banking and financial transactions etc, is becoming more complex to ensure. In fact, as a consequence of such leaks, the United States federal government was prompted to intervene and has mandated that companies should protect sensitive information such as financial and patient medical records. From the companies and businesses standpoint, potential risks include financial losses, fiduciary risks, legal problems, competitive intelligence, public relations problems, loss of clients and privacy liability. There is therefore a great interest in methods that may mitigate disclosure of confidential printed documents.
Another related issue is the issue of document retention policy: a policy that limits liability and leakage hazards by destroying documents after the minimal time required by law and practice. The ease of making a large number of copies from each information item makes it hard to ensure that all the copies of given information item have really been destroyed. Current methods do not provide an efficient solution to enforce a required document retention policy.
There is thus a recognized need for, and it would be highly advantageous to have, a method and system that allows monitoring and controlling of unauthorized dissemination of printed documents and portable media and efficient enforcement of document retention policy, which will overcome the drawbacks of current methods as described above.